North Wales Moors - Stakeholder Workshop - 10 February 2016

I am looking forward to attending the stakeholder workshop at the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel, on 10 February.  The workshop is being organised by the RSPB as part of the bid, which is due to be submitted in September 2016, to the EU LIFE Nature Fund for the North Wales Moors.

If approved, the project will focus on: restoration of blanket bogs across the project area, establishing favourable condition on dry heath and aim to achieve favourable conservation status of Merlin and Hen harrier in the Berwyn and Migneint-Arenig-Dduallt SAC & SPAs.

I hope that the Trust will be able to support this project and build on the contacts we re-established in Wales as part of the meeting held on the Rhiwlas Estate last October, in conjunction with the Trust's AGM.  I understand that the numbers attending have been kept small, but it would be good to see other members and supporters at the meeting.  If you are attending, please let me know.

Burning in the Uplands - My Cup is Half-Full

Details of the RSPB-led Study

A new study led by the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science has revealed the extent of moorland burning across Britain’s upland areas. This is the first time upland burning has been mapped in detail across mainland Britain. 

Using aerial photography and satellite images, 45,000 1-km squares were mapped across Scotland, England and Wales, and revealed that burning occurred across 8,551 of these squares, including 5,245 squares in Scotland.  In the ten-year period covered by the study, from 2001 to 2011, the number of fires recorded increased rapidly by 11 per cent each year.

For more information see the RSPB press release.  The paper has been published in Biological Conservation, Volume 191, November 2015, Pages 243–250.  The abstract of the paper can be viewed online and the full paper is available to download for a fee.

Comment

This study is useful as it helps to build a picture of what is going on, but while it has highlighted the problems, it has not addressed possible solutions.  I suspect that this was not part of the research brief, but increasingly I believe that we need to put more effort into joining problems to solutions, if we are going to make progress.

It is relatively easy to use burning to fuel a rant about the state of our peatlands, but we should remember that these areas were, until recently (very recently in the life of peat), regarded as wasteland.  These are slow moving habitats and it will take a long time, under consistent management, to improve their condition.  I would be among the first to agree we need to improve the way we manage burning in many areas, and through this the condition of peatland, but before we discard the management tools, which after all have got us the habitat we all now value highly, we need to think about how the peatland is to be managed, and by whom.

In the short term, my action plan for peatland includes:

• Continuing to raise the profile of peatland - it is an important habitat that needs sensitive management;
• Encouraging the revegetation of bare peat areas to reduce erosion by wind and water;
• Introducing guidelines for traditional peat cutting (for domestic purposes only);
• Agreeing what long-term management is required to improve the condition of the peatland; and
• For highly degraded sites, seek funding for capital works to, for example: 
• reprofile peat hags, 
• block man made ditches and other drainage channels to raise the water table, and
• introduce sphagnum mosses to wet sites, where absent.

Longer-term action will rely on the owners and land managers to make the right decisions for the management of the uplands and the peat stocks they contain. This is an area that needs to be looked at separately.

We should not forget that burning takes place to support: crofting; upland agriculture and commons management; and deer stalking, as well as grouse moor management. Picking on grouse moor managers and then using the detrimental side of burning as a stick to beat them with is potentially self-defeating. Privately funded grouse moor managers are a significant proportion of the upland work force, and if their efforts can be correctly focused, alongside the full range of other managers in the uplands, they should be seen as part of the solution, not the problem. We need the support of these people to deliver the objectives we seek.

Also outside the scope of the study are the considerable changes that are already taking place in the uplands. As demonstrated by our Golden Plover Award, and the take up of support from the Peatland Action project in Scotland, landowners and managers are beginning to embrace the 'love your peatlands' message. We still have a way to go with this, but momentum is building.

During the 'bogathon’ visits, in Northern England last year, which the RSPB were part of, we agreed that burning should remain as one of the management tools, but it needs to be applied intelligently, not by rote.  We need to adjust burning techniques and rotations to suit the requirements of the land, including peatland, and this may mean less, or even no, burning in some areas.  This might save grouse moor managers some work!  

Also, the alternative of cutting heather, should not be ignored.  Cutting cannot be used everywhere, but the Trust's recent studies have recorded that some grouse moor managers are getting excellent results through cutting alone.  See our Members' Briefing on Heather Management in the Reading Room on the Trust's website.

I believe that the picture is for from being as gloomy as the study would have us believe.  The winds of change have started to blow, and with encouragement I believe that momentum is building behind improving our management of burning and the condition of our peatland.  My cup is half-full!

For Peat's Sake RSPB - join the party

It will not have escaped the attention of anyone, with an interest in the uplands and access to the Internet, that there have been some acrimonious public exchanges in the last couple of weeks.  The debate has been hotting up around moorland management and raptor persecution. Due to my preference to present positive management issues, this is not an area that the Heather Trust strays into very often, but on this occasion I have been drawn to comment.

For those who want to follow the debate the exchanges are available on the websites - see the RSPB letter, and the Moorland Association reply.

My view of this sort of exchange is that achieves very little apart from a deepening of the trenches from which the bricks are launched, and the birds that the RSPB seeks to protect are the most likely losers from this continuing trench warfare. I do not deny that the land management community needs to get its house in order, but an approach that risks the alienation of every landowner, land manager, gamekeeper and farmer cannot be the best way of making progress. Management may not be perfect, but the owners and managers of land are the only people who can make a difference. We need to encourage a spirit of cooperation, not alienation, and work together.  With a bit of compromise, there is the potential to deliver lasting benefits for all interest groups.

The bog-athon visits described in the previous post illustrate what can be achieved from a little consensus building. This approach may not increase membership numbers or produce column inches in the same way, but in my view it is much more likely to produce lasting benefits for the upland areas and species that we all work to protect and enhance. The bog-athon has started a process, which has the RSPB at its core, that is capable of delivering real progress.

High Peak - damaged peatland

It is extremely confusing and frustrating that on return from a positive meeting of the burning group, I was met by another missive from the RSPB that seeks to ban burning in the Peak District ‘For Peat’s Sake Stop the Burn’.  This promotes a very different and negative message to that coming out of the bog-athon process.  There is a challenge in the Peak District to repair the damage of the past, but we will achieve little by heated exchange.

Perhaps the RSPB needs to get its house in order and decide what it really wants to achieve.  Then the organisation needs to be realistic about how best to do this.  I would be delighted to to support them where our interests overlap (which would be in many places) but the mixed messages coming out of the organisation at the moment make this difficult, or even impossible.

Come on RSPB - it is time to get off your high horse and join the party.  A united moorland management industry could achieve great things.

Welsh Connections

The Trust has been rather quiet in Wales recently.  I regret this separation as I believe there are plenty of opportunities for the HT message to be beneficially applied in Wales, but as a result of two recent visits, I hope that this situation is about to change.

There has been a big upheaval in Wales with the establishment of a combined government agency called Natural Resources Wales (NRW) that has been formed from the Countryside Commission for Wales (CCW), and the Forestry Commission and the Environment Agency in Wales.  This new organisation will no doubt take time to bed down but it provides an opportunity to reconsider the support for the Welsh uplands.  I hope that this will prove to be a turning point for an integrated approach to moorland management in Wales.

In response to the formation of NRW, the Country Land & Business Association (CLA) in Wales called together a group of landowners to consider how an approach to the Welsh Government could best be made to highlight the importance and value of the Welsh uplands.  I was pleased to attend this meeting, and I have offered support for any work that develops from it.

I have been maintaining a watching brief as a member of Upland Ecosystems Group (UEG) in Wales, but it has been hard to justify attending meetings as there has been no opportunities to develop any involvement.  However, I was able to attend a meeting of the UEG, last week, and this was combined with a workshop for a new project being run by the RSPB called North Wales Moors Futurescapes; this seeks to consider landscape scale conservation management across a large area of the uplands that include Ruabon Moor, the Berwyn Mountains, and moorland at  Migneint and Hiraethog.  I have suggested that some 'old fashioned' demonstration events that I champion for the Trust could be beneficial to being people together to discuss the issues.

I hope that these initiatives will serve to re-establish the Trust's presence in Wales and allow us to provide some  input that will help to improve the management of the Welsh uplands.

Nature of Scotland Awards

The Nature of Scotland Awards is run by the RSPB and recognises and rewards those who are making a real difference to the conservation of Scotland’s beautiful landscapes and unique wildlife. The 2013 awards are open for entries on the 14 November 2012.

There are eight categories to enter, each identifying a different area of nature conservation: Marine Conservation; Sustainable Development; Politician of the Year; Innovation; Outstanding Contribution; RSPB Species Champion; Community Initiative; Education. 

It is free to enter to nominate those who should be rewarded for their conservation efforts.  The website has more information about how to enter, and the deadline for submissions is 15 March 2013.

RSPB Review of Grouse Moor Management

The full title of the review is: The costs and benefits of grouse moor management to biodiversity and aspects of the wider environment and it is available to download.

The covering e-mail that announced the publication of the review states:
"In recognition of the need to understand the value of grouse management, the RSPB has undertaken a review of the scientific evidence on the environmental consequences of grouse moor management.  Through the review, we seek to set out an objective view of the current state of our knowledge on the impact of grouse moor management, considering the scientific evidence for both beneficial and detrimental effects of the associated management on biodiversity and ecosystem services."

Although clearly well-researched, at first sight this is pretty dry reading and I am not sure that it takes us any further forward.